Old Chinese Morphology

(4,016 words)

Old Chinese (OC; also "Archaic Chinese" in the terminology of Bernhard Karlgren, c. 1250 BCE to 206 BCE) was an isolating language lacking the inflectional morphology that characterizes Indo-European (IE) languages (e.g., declensions of nouns for case/number, conjugation of verbs for person/number/tense/mood). In OC only word class and word order determine a word’s role and meaning in a sentence. Attempts to classify the OC lexicon in terms of IE word classes (nouns, adjectives, adverbs, transit…